Bush vets split on Syria

President George W. Bush boldly took the country to war in Iraq a decade ago, but now some of his administration’s most vocal champions of that controversial endeavor are divided over what to do about Syria.

Some former Bush officials say the U.S. shouldn’t strike at Bashar Assad’s regime over the recent chemical weapons attacks on civilians, saying it’s too late to salvage national security interests there. Others argue that if a bombing campaign is warranted, President Barack Obama has yet to make the case.

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John Negroponte, who served as Bush’s director of national intelligence, said his experience with the war in Iraq makes him worry about the accuracy of intelligence that’s driving calculations over how to respond to the chemical weapons attacks that killed hundreds of civilians in Syria.

“I think the concern here is, for those of us who worked on Iraq during the Bush administration, someone like myself who helped set up the [Director of National Intelligence], is the whole issue of how confident can we be of our information, and do we have a sufficient basis to justify action?” he said, adding, “You’ll remember we went to the [U.N.] Security Council convinced we were right about Saddam’s having weapons of mass destruction. That turned out not to be correct.”

President Barack Obama said on Wednesday that the U.S. has “concluded” that the Assad regime used chemical weapons against its own people, crossing what he previously defined as a “red line.” Though Obama has said he hasn’t decided on the next steps, his administration is eyeing its military options. The president spoke with House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday about Syria, and top administration officials briefed some lawmakers that evening.

Bush, for his part, said on Friday that he was “not a fan” of Assad but acknowledged that Obama faces challenging questions on Syria.

“The president’s got a tough choice to make and if he decides to use our military, he’ll have the greatest military ever backing him up,” he said on Fox News.

Internationally, the case for intervention in Syria could be a tough sell. Evidence of that came Thursday when British Prime Minister David Cameron lost an early vote in parliament concerning Syrian intervention. Negroponte said he was deeply wary of a situation in which the U.S. might decide to go it alone — which administration officials indicated was a possibility, according to reports Thursday night.

“Maybe we’re all prisoners of our own experiences,” Negroponte said. “Certainly, what I feel I learned about what happened a decade ago is, we paid a very high political price both domestically and internationally for having preemptively acted without a sufficient base of international support. That is really what preoccupies me the most.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who led the Pentagon as the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, made headlines when he told Fox News Wednesday that the White House hasn’t justified bombing Syria.

“There really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation,” he said.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said in an interview that while the civil war in Syria does involve American national security interests, action at this stage — more than two years into the bloody conflict — would be counterproductive. Obama has taken heat from some corners for saying a year ago that chemical weapons use crosses a “red line,” but then not following through on retaliation sooner.

“It is a mess largely of the president’s own creation,” Bolton charged. “I think our credibility has been damaged, I think the president’s credibility has been. But feckless use of military force would damage the country’s credibility more.”